Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 35, No. 56.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2021-05-30 15:04:50+00:00
        From: Henry Schaffer <hes@ncsu.edu>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 35.45: interdisciplinary

Years ago I had stopped worrying whether my research field was in a
discipline, was interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or some other
variation. My work was in genetics, a field broadly considered important.
It had subdivisions which were clearly seen by geneticists (biochemical and
quantitative) but that division was ignored in simple use of the term
"genetics".

My campus had a Genetics Department. Did that make genetics a discipline?
However many of the departmental faculty actually had their appointments
and departmental homes in other university departments, such as Statistics,
Crop Science, Entomology, Animal Science, Biochemistry and more - and may
have added up to a majority of the Genetics Department. Did that make
genetics interdisciplinary, or maybe transdisciplinary? More importantly,
should I have spent sleepless nights worrying about that?

But now my Genetics Department was mostly incorporated into a new (rather
large) Department of Biological Sciences along with faculty from a number
of other biological departments. What does that do to the discussion of
whether Genetics is a discipline? It raises the question of whether Biology
is a discipline - maybe not since it's in the College of Sciences. Could
Science be *the* discipline? Whoops - it's College of Science*s* - plural.
So are the sciences each disciplines?

Should we care?

--henry


On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 1:28 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 35, No. 45.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                                 Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2021-05-26 12:59:43+00:00
>         From: Dr. Herbert Wender <drwender@aol.com>
>         Subject: Re: [Humanist] 35.43: interdisciplinary
>
> Dear Dino,
>
> Relatively nearby from my home office there is such a thing: "The Trier
> Center
> for Digital Humanities| Kompetenzzentrum is a central scientific research
> institution ofTrier University."
>
> If I see it right, it was founded as a service center and has evolved to
> the
> actual "research institute", possibly despite the cited self-descriptioon
> a so-
> called 'An-Institut', i.e. an Institute *at *, not *of* the universitiy. An
> earlier name of this instituion was "Kompetenzzentrum für elektronische
> Erschließungs- und Publikationsverfahren in den Geisteswissenschaften",
> but in
> English versions it was already named "Trier Center for Digital
> Humanities". If
> I understand you correctly such an Institute stands for "a discipline in
> its
> own right".
>
> It seems that I was, as others with respect to 'interdisciplinary',
> mislead in
> my interpretation of the term 'discipline', misleaded apparently by the
> translation in the ToC of "Glottodidactica": "Basic and Referential
> Disciplines
> / Grundlagen- und Referenzwissenschaften".
>
> To understand well your proposition of 'Institute for Humanities Computing'
> (withour apostrophe after 'Humanitites'?): can I translate it into German
> '...elektronische Datenverarbeitung in den Geisteswissenschaften'?
>
> And obviously we have also different notions of 'transdisciplinary'. But I
> leave
> this for another time; only to sharpen my own understanding: Statistics,
> for me,
> is 'a  discipline in its own right', with mathematics as at least a
> 'reference
> discipline' (Referenzwissenschaft) if not a 'basic discipline'
> (Grundlagenwissenschaft). Statistical methods are in transdisciplinary
> use, f.e.
> in econometrics: "Econometrics is the application of statistical methods to
> economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships"
> (Wikipedia). Please correct me, if this is a misuse of 'transdisciplinary'.
>
> Kind regards, Herbert



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